


Record Keeping

by oneinspats



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M, don't drink and climb friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-25
Updated: 2016-11-25
Packaged: 2018-09-02 01:25:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8646049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneinspats/pseuds/oneinspats
Summary: The art and finesse of discussing things without discussing them. Or. Downey has gin, there is a window ledge, assassins reminisce.





	

In the way that witches seek each other out in order to avoid the Cackle it is known, upon occasion, for assassins to seek each other out to avoid their equivalent. That there is not a savvy name to go along with it perturbs Downey and he has dedicated many a moment during Guild meetings to coming up with something as concise and to-the-point as 'Cackle'. To date, little luck.

Downey knows that words are not his strength. He never had the quick cleverness other people had of coming to hand with a witty phrase as if from thin air. As a boy reading had been a struggle for letters played havoc upon the page and only with great effort did he manage to get them to stay put in the correct order long enough to make sense of the entire thing. Then there were the colours with words that confused matters further. Written language, he admires and hates it. There are many things he admires and hates.

He muddles through another collection of phrases to attempt to capture this need of assassins to keep each other sane. How does one encapsulate the fleeting, ephemeral quality of such companionship? For many years you might drink with a man - or person, it's persons now - and then the next thing you know he's - they've - decided that you are on the bend and need to be taken out for the good of the Guild. It is beautiful. The way such relationships skirt along the fluttering edges of acknowledgement. He adores them.

Climbing up to a window he taps at the glass. In coat pocket is a bottle of gin. He had thought to bring tonic but did not wish to climb all the way up to the Oblong Office with it only to not drink it.

He leans back as the window is opened.

'What?'

'Thought you'd be working. Be a good chap and let me in.'

Vetinari stands back and motions. Downey clambers over the ledge and into the office. He comments upon the filthy weather. Vetinari declines a response. Not expecting one, Downey continues to talk as he removes coat and hat and dumps them on a chair that has not been offered to him. Vetinari returns to his own and watches over those constantly steepled fingers. Downey lounges on top of his clothes.

'Gin?'

Vetinari raises an eye brow.

'I'll take that as a yes. I'm getting us glasses. It's a filthy night. Have I mentioned that it's a filthy night?'

'You're drunk, Downey.'

'No.' He sticks his head out of the office door and shouts for two tumblers to be brought to the Office. A servant materializes with the requested items and Downey shuts the door then locks it. 'Not yet, at least. I plan to be.'

'I'm busy.'

'So am I.' Downey eyes the tumblers and pours a healthy amount for each of them. He pushes the glass over, 'cheers.'

Vetinari looks at it then to the other man. And oh, it is with such restrained annoyance he raises his own glass and takes a sip. Downey nods. Declares that everything is better already. Then he stills and stares into his glass for a long moment. How to form a request. Language. He is acceptable at it when he puts effort into it. When he sits with sober head and sober thoughts and makes mountains from sliding sand of words. The man in front of him is so much more at home in this territory. This unknown country.

'The Cackle,' Downey says. He looks up to find Vetinari's expression one of concern but it flees upon being witnessed. Neutral returns. 'What is a good word to express the Assassin's version of the Cackle?'

'I didn't know you knew of that.'

'I know a lot of things you don't know that I know.'

Vetinari blinks at this. He shrugs. Probably.

'At school you were always the boy with words. A quick wit. I remember a teacher of ours saying while we were both smart you were quicker and that ate me up.'

Vetinari sips his gin.

'He hadn't mentioned that you were a man of quick silence, too.' A cheeky smile. Approximation thereof. Downey wonders why he is here and perhaps he should have asked the Guild's Bursar. 'But I suppose it had not signified for much, then.'

'No.'

'And a man for contrariness. You're as stiff necked as old Stoneface when you want to be.'

'And you as loquacious as Lady Sybil.'

'Thank you.' A real smile. 'Top up?'

'Why?'

'What?'

Vetinari motions to the bottle. 'This has nothing to do with words.'

Downey shrugs. If the patrician wishes to think so, that is his prerogative. He pours them both a second round. This one less generous than the first.

'I sometimes wonder how history is going to remember Snapcase's time.' He says. 'Yours well - it will be what it will be. Probably a positive review. But his. What do we have of it?'

Vetinari turns the glass around in hand but he is looking just past Downey to the window, a fraction open, behind him. He shakes his head. Not much he concedes. Snapcase was not a meticulous record keeper. And we none of us are leaving memoirs about it.

Downey agrees. It will be a blank patch in Ankh-Morpork history.

'You're not a man for history,' Vetinari says. 'You preferred sciences and maths if I remember correctly.'

'You know you remember correctly. I was just reminiscing earlier. Some of the - that is, graduation is soon and the class are all talking of having a reunion in the future. If we were to do that it'd be you and me and maybe a few others.'

'Thinning numbers amongst assassins isn't unusual.'

'Oh you know damn well what I mean.'    

Vetinari bows his head. He finishes his glass. 'Yes.' This time it is his turn to refill their glasses. He remarks that they are making quick work of this bottle and had best to slow down. Especially if Downey wishes to make it back to the guild in one piece. Being in one piece, the lord says, is over rated. All of our friends from school are in two or more.

'Do you remember Ludo?' Vetinari asks, suddenly.

'Course I do. He was the only one of the upper years I could tolerate.'

'You really did dislike everyone.'

'I was young and had a chip on my shoulder bigger than the disk. Made walking and functioning as a human difficult.'            

Vetinari looks up to the ceiling for a moment. Downey points, Ah! Made you laugh.

They drift from the desk to the window and eventually out to the ledge. The night remains a filthy one but the gin warms skin and throat and mind and enflames the memory more than a monument covered in lilac or a statue in a city square. Ludo has neither of those.

'Do you ever regret it?' Downey asks. It is late but late enough to be early and neither can remember the last time they had done this because it would have been during school, or perhaps just after, and it would have fallen under that vague, shifting ephemeral relationship (because assassins refuse the tangible with one another even if means not tasting, not touching, not feeling enough of one another) period best described as 'a time we do not speak of especially in public now that we are both public citizens of a voyeuristic opinionated city'.

'I thought we agreed to let that remain in the past.'

'I'll take that as a no.'

'You sound pleased.'

'I am. Hurts a man to think he were regretted.'

Vetinari murmurs, 'your merchant-class is showing through.'

Downey nudges his shoulder with his own, 'your bastard origins are as obvious as your hair colour.'        

In a moment of clarity in the befuddlement of gin Vetinari picks some fluff off of Downey's shoulder and holds it to the wind. 'Some would make a big deal of a little bit of fluff.'        

'De Worde would. I dislike him.'

Although Vetinari's expression does not change, per se, Downey can see a softening about the eyes. It is a wonder, he thinks, us managing to make it so we are growing old together and I have white hair now and he has grey about the temples and we both have wrinkles and imperfections and in my mind he is still a young man and still lobbing apples at me because I am a veritable boar of a boy.

'Still have a bit of a chip, I see.'

'I can't help it. Downey men are born with them.'

'No.'

'I assure you, we are.'

'No - no, I mean to answer your question. No, I don't regret it. But do not put too much stock in this, Downey, I do not see the point in regretting things most of the time.'

Downey takes Vetinari's hand in his own and pats it. He says that Vetinari always did have a way with romance. It warms the cockles of his very cold and bitter heart.

'I've met cold and bitter men, Downey. I would never classify you as one of them.'

'Sweetest thing you've ever said.'

'And here you are attempting to remove the gravitas from the situation. I'll desist then. Since it makes you uncomfortable.'

Finding nothing to say in reply to that Downey continues to pat Vetinari's hand. The sky is still an inky black when they climb back into the office through the window and lament age and the cold and how they're both too old for such things, now. Such things being window ledges and bottles of gin.

'Do we need a word for it?' Vetinari asks as Downey dawns coat and hat.

'Probably not.'

'Language can be as restricting as it can be liberating.'

Downey thinks that there is something to be said in reply to that be cannot fathom what it would be. There is a plane, a world in which Vetinari's mind works and calculates and runs wild through rivulets of possibility but it is a world that Downey does not understand and he finds himself being honest for once and thinking that if that is genius and something akin to the divine he is glad to be merely mortal. But that gladness of circumstance does not mean he cannot love the damn'd man.

'I'll see you at the council meeting tomorrow.' Downey says with a tip of his hat. He opens the window and looks down. The height is very great.

'Yes.'

He sits and swings his legs back out. Gives a small wave, tosses the bottle over to Vetinari and says he can do what he wants with the remainder, and begins a slow climb down. Wind brushes against wall and him and skin is gooseflesh. It is cold enough to make his jaw ache, his ears hurt, and it forces his mind to be numb. He hopes that he does not fall.


End file.
